Finite Element Studies of Large Scale Earth Resistance Measurements

The earth electrical resistance (R
ES
) plays a major role in the safety of both personnel and instrumentation. The purpose of a ground is to provide a safe path for the dissipation of fault currents, lightning strikes, static discharges… To study and test systems in the laboratory we need tools to reproduce real conditions in terms of structure design and soil profiles, which are important in these types of installation. A conditioning fact is that it is known that R
ES
is roughly inversely proportional to soil conductivity, so the design must consider the characteristics of the terrain. Finite Element simulations (FEM) have demonstrated that are a very powerful software resource to study different optimization strategies to reduce the R
ES
. Our research work has used COMSOL Multiphysics software to reproduce conditions in a high resistivity soil and different earth electrical structures of electrodes has been proved to evaluate the improvements that should be adopted to minimize R
ES
value [1].